Okay, maybe Amazon is off the hook. The well-known troll Weev is claiming that he's actually responsible for Amazon's sudden surge of LGBT prudishness. Which Valleywag says actually makes sense.
It's startingly simple: It doesn't take very many votes at all to get a product flagged as "inappropriate" and booted off the rankings. He says he created a script that generated a list of product IDs for every gay and lesbian book on Amazon. From there, he just needed a whole bunch of people to flag the books as inappropriate, which wasn't hard, because simply getting someone to go the URL of a successful flag would count as another one. Using an invisible iframe on popular websites owned by friends and a group of "third-worlders" he hired to register accounts, he generated enough votes to de-list gay and lesbian books en masse.
Lending credence to his claims, Valleywag notes that the "flag as inappropriate" feature is currently disabled. Free reign for inappropriate books! [Livejournal via Valleywag]
Off the hook? I'd say NOT. While being anti-gay is bad, having a major e-tailer site be THAT vulnerable to attack is even scarier. The bigger story here may not be that Amazon.com is anti-gay but that they denied being the victim of a nasty online attack.
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